Sustainability in our products
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Sustainability in our products

Product safety and compliance

We ensure that our products remain safe and compliant with global regulations. We provide safety, health, environmental and regulatory information on our products so that they can be handled safely by our colleagues and customers.

Going beyond legislative obligations and as part of responsible care of our products throughout their life-cycle, we also routinely screen for the presence of substances of concern (SOC). These are substances which are, or are likely to become, restricted or banned by regulatory action or face pressure for substitution, typically due to certain intrinsic hazard properties or risks of adverse effects to human health or the environment. 

All applications of SOCs are assessed to ensure their use is safe and, where possible, we seek to substitute them for safer alternatives.

REACH

The European Union’s REACH (the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals) regulation has become the model for tighter control of chemical use. It has required many years of testing and assessment to complete all necessary substance registrations and ensure that our products can be used safely.

Since the end of the REACH registration phase in 2018, Infineum continues to invest significant resources in ensuring ongoing compliance with REACH as well as other chemical safety initiatives, including equivalent regulations in Korea, Taiwan and Turkey.

In-use benefits

Our fuel and lubricant additives provide enhanced fuel economy performance, while delivering optimal wear protection to engine hardware.

They are a critical enabler to minimise the impact of global transportation and power generation during the transition phase to a lower carbon future and will continue to play an important role in the coming decades. 

As regulators the world over introduce ever tightening emissions regulations and OEMs maintain net-zero and sustainability commitments, there is a growing need for cleaner and greener vehicle technologies. This is driving hardware changes to meet the latest emissions regulations and a preference for lower-viscosity oils to achieve fuel economy improvements. We are collaborating closely with our value chain partners to develop solutions that will continue to help engines operate more efficiently, enabling improved fuel economy, emissions system protection and overall resource optimisation. 

Increasing oil drain intervals

Engine lubricants degrade over time and the oil’s ability to provide adequate lubrication, reduced friction and heat dissipation is diminished. Our additives improve oxidation control and neutralise acids formed during combustion. This extends oil drain intervals, which reduces downtime and operating costs for vehicle owners and engine maintenance companies, means less oil gets used and reduces waste.

Improving fuel economy and energy efficiency

The fuel efficiency of a vehicle is affected by the efficiency of its powertrain, which transfers power from the engine and delivers it to the road surface, water or air. Our lubricant and driveline additives make powertrains more efficient, thereby enhancing the vehicle’s fuel economy performance. Our marine fuel additives also enable enhanced fuel economy, reduced fuel wastage and lower emissions output.

Extending engine life

Our lubricant products are designed to reduce engine friction and improve wear protection, resulting in improved engine durability and prolonged life. This helps to reduce waste and raw material consumption by keeping existing vehicles in operation for longer and minimising hardware replacement. With oil drain intervals continuing to lengthen, there's an additional need to ensure that oils can protect the engine throughout the lifetime of the vehicle. Our fuel additives also reduce wear in critical engine components. Our products also help extend the longevity of aftertreatment systems that remove or reduce the harmful by-products of engine combustion, especially particulate matter, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, thereby reducing their impact on air quality.

Compatibility with more sustainable feedstocks

Our fuel additives are formulated to enable refiners to incorporate more sustainable content into their fuels portfolio by mitigating cold flow and lubricity debits. This gives our customers the flexibility to switch to lower-carbon circular or alternatives, whilst meeting performance requirements for a wide-range of end-use applications. 


Enabling electrification

As the automotive industry looks for cleaner and greener solutions, the market for driveline fluids continues to change. In the coming years, the number of light and heavy battery electric vehicles is expected to grow - providing opportunities for advanced fluids to deliver both hardware protection and cooling. Our E-fluids allow electric and hybrid vehicles to operate in optimised conditions.

Applying life-cycle thinking to our product portfolio

The environmental impacts of the products and components we develop are assessed at every part of our value chain, from the extraction of raw materials to the end-of-life treatment of our products. This informs how we manage our product portfolios and enables our technologists and product formulators to take into consideration sustainability criteria, risks and opportunities.

We continue to meet our 2025 target of assessing 100% of new Infineum products against sustainability criteria such as climate, energy management, resource efficiency, waste generation and circular economy in addition to regulatory analysis. In addition to all new product developments, in 2024, we also carried out an assessment of our core business segments, covering 78% of our product portfolio. Our approach is adapted from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) portfolio sustainability assessment framework (PSA 2.0). We have categorised our portfolio into five categories: Leading, Progressing, Standard, Managed and Challenged.

Products in Leading and Progressing categories are assessed as having sustainability-related benefits without any major sustainability-related challenges. For example, products in our driveline sub-segment for e-mobility fluids enable electric vehicles to operate efficiently and deliver improved air quality while minimising harmful greenhouse gas emissions and our top tier lubricant additives facilitate fuel economy improvements and extended oil drain intervals. In 2024, 42% of our portfolio based on revenue fell into these two categories. We have set a new ambition to increase the share of our portfolio in the top two categories to 55% by 2030. 

Products identified with sustainability concerns are managed with an improvement plan or scheduled a decommercialization process within a 5-year period should no improvement scenario be identified. We currently have approximately 1% of our products in the challenged category although we anticipate a more challenging regulatory landscape in the years to come that will require continuous improvement.

Introducing circular raw materials

We work closely with suppliers, customers, and OEMs to improve the total impact profile of our products by looking for raw material substitutions that achieve the right balance of lower product carbon footprint, in-use performance and cost competitiveness.

For example, we are continuing to incorporate circular material in key products through the use of re-refined base oil (RRBO) as a diluent in components and blends. Re-refining requires significantly less energy than is needed for refining crude oil to produce base oil and it also means less non-renewable virgin oil is consumed. This results in reduced waste and lower carbon footprint, contributing to more circular and sustainable products.

 

Based on our long history of developing lubricant formulations in RRBO and extensive field test data, our quality assurance processes ensure all RRBO used in additive production and lubricant development meet the same stringent quality and performance requirements

In 2024, we expanded the use of RRBO significantly in three of our manufacturing sites in Italy, France and the USA. This represented a four-fold increase in RRBO use compared to 2023, which we have calculated to be worth 15kt CO2e in scope 3 emissions savings. 

We are now focusing on controlling the cost of these initiatives to ensure that they are commercially viable, scalable and affordable to the end consumer. At the same time, we are developing chain of custody solutions that will enable us to pass on more value to our customers and help them to achieve their own sustainability objectives.